Technical Product Manager (hands-on, startup experience) - AI agents for service businesses
Category: Product Manager
Experience: 5+ years
Salary: $2,500–4,000 / month full-time; part-time (15–20 h/week) pro-rated
Employment: full-time or part-time, your choice
Format: remote; 4–5 hours of daily overlap with US Pacific time (Seattle)
English: Upper-Intermediate or better; you'll be on video calls with US customers
Domain: SaaS, startup
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I run a service company in the US: 20 years, about 30 employees. I'm not a developer, but earlier this year I built an AI system for my own business with Claude Code, and it's been live ever since, handling real customer inquiries, pricing jobs, and drafting replies for a human to approve. That proved the idea. Since June I've had a strong senior engineer working with me full time, and we've spent the months since building the foundation for the real product: the same thing, done properly, for other service businesses.
Here's where I'm honest with you. The two of us are good at what we each do, and we're missing the person in the middle. I bring the business: customers, sales, and how service companies actually run. My engineer brings deep technical skill. What neither of us brings is startup experience: someone who has taken a small product from zero to paying customers and knows, from having done it, what matters at this stage and what can wait.
That's the role.
What you'll do:
- Set direction. Decide with me what we build next and in what order, and keep us from building things that don't need to exist yet.
- Write the specs. Short, clear, one page, something the engineer can pick up in the morning and ship. This is a core skill for the role, and we'll test it in the interview.
- Run the week. Plans, decisions, and a weekly summary to me in plain language: what was built, what wasn't, and why. Right now I rely on AI to understand what happened in my own project. That has to stop.
- Build. You close medium and smaller tasks yourself with Claude Code, Cursor, or similar. This is not a role for someone who only writes documents.
- Look outward. Follow how small businesses are actually adopting AI and what works, and bring that back as ideas we can use.
- Join customer calls with me when it helps to have the technical side in the room.
Who I'm looking for:
- You've been part of an early-stage product that reached paying customers, in a team small enough to count on one hand. You know what "too early for that" looks like.
- You build with AI first. Claude Code, Cursor, or similar are your daily tools, and you have real opinions about where they help and where they create work.
- Solid enough with Node.js/TypeScript, Postgres, GitHub and one cloud platform to read our code, review a pull request, and ship a task yourself.
- You write and speak clearly. You can explain a technical trade-off to a business owner in a minute, and write a spec a developer doesn't have to guess at.
- You simplify. You're the person who asks "do we need this?" before "how do we build this?"
- Ukrainian or Russian is a plus (the engineer is in Kyiv), not a requirement.
Not a fit if
- You want to manage people and not touch code.
- You need a big team and a mature product to feel comfortable.
Pay and terms
- $2,500–4,000 per month full time, or pro-rated for 15–20 hours a week. Paid through Wise. I cover software and AI tokens.
- We start with a short call, then a small paid task from our real backlog: write the one-page spec and tell me what you'd cut. Then a paid two-week trial with one deliverable: your honest read of where the product stands and what we should do in the next month. If that goes well, a contract.
How to apply
Send me three things, in any format:
1. One early-stage product you worked on: what it was, how small the team was, whether it reached paying customers, and what you'd do differently now.
2. A spec you wrote (or a rewritten version of one, if the original is confidential).
3. Your rate, full-time and part-time.
I read every serious application myself. No agencies, no recruiters.